Yeley, Sorenson find bright spots in difficult season

	Struggling to keep pace with teammates Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin, J.J. Yeley's second-place run at Charlotte was just what his Joe Gibbs team was looking for. Bennett Raglin/WireImage.com
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Despite the dominance of drivers like Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Tony Stewart, NASCAR's underdogs are still capable of occasionally having their day in the sun. What's rare is when all of them decide to shine at exactly the same time.

Sunday night under the lights, NASCAR officially entered that twilight zone.

The top five finishers in the Coca-Cola 600 all claimed their best finishes of the season: Casey Mears, J.J. Yeley, Kyle Petty, Reed Sorenson and Brian Vickers. With a grand total of three top-10s between them all season entering the race, the finish as Lowe's made for one of the most surprising in recent history. That's made it difficult for all the underdogs to grab all of he attention they deserve; since the race, most of the coverage has focused on the fourth Hendrick driver to win (Mears), the lovable veteran (Petty) or Toyota's future star (Vickers).

Well, it's time to shed some light on the other two drivers who popped up on that list: Yeley and Sorenson. They've got more in common between them than you might think. Both are in their second year driving Cup, are No. 3 in the pecking order with their respective teams, and, most of all, have a more troubling byline describing them than lovable veteran:

"Trying to keep their job."

"If I get fired, I get fired," said Yeley after his second place run in Joe Gibbs Racing's No. 18 Chevrolet. "There are a couple of places I can go."

Yeley's concerns over packing his bags didn't just develop out of thin air, but via a warning from team president J.D. Gibbs. Watching Yeley stumble out of the blocks with a best finish of 12th in his first 11 starts of '07, it's become harder for the team to justify keeping a struggling sophomore when names like Earnhardt, Biffle and Newman appear ripe for the picking. Pulling Yeley aside before the races at Charlotte, Gibbs' message was clear: shape up or ship out.

It's the kind of message that should put a driver on edge, which is where Yeley usually drives his car, leading to extended stints behind the wall that usually keep him from putting forth the type of strong finish put together on Sunday.

That aggressiveness hasn't transferred to Yeley's personality, though. One of the more lighthearted guys in the garage, he's comfortable with the role he's played in digging himself this hole -- one he's shared with a dangerous woman called Lady Luck.

"Obviously, it's easy to pick on me," he explained. "Last year, I had the worst season I've ever had in my life racing. I was caught up in the most accidents -- I read that somewhere in the paper. Statistics show that I was in a wreck 40 percent of the time. But it didn't show that I cut a tire down half the times or I got wrecked by someone else. [On the final results sheet] you don't know what happened other than at the end of the day, I was wrecked."